Carn the Phantom: Chorus-line fever trumps our football fetish

Imagine a world in which musical theatre outscores AFL.

By Monica Dux

May 18, 2018 — 12.05pm

I adore musicals. Sondheim is my favourite, but I also love many MGM classics, and in my opinion the Rice-Webber collaboration produced some of the best show tunes in history. They're more than just a distraction for me. Going to watch a musical stage show lifts my spirits, giving me a boost that lasts for days.

Even so, I recognise that there are many, many people who can't stand musical theatre. People who find it silly, nonsensical and boring. And that's OK, it really is.

If musicals aren't your cup of tea, I won't try to persuade you to see one. I won't turn them up loud if you come over for dinner, nor will I attempt to engage you in conversation about them when I know you're not interested. If you insist on telling me how stupid you find them, I'll hear you out, politely. I won't get angry, or defensive, or imply that you're weird for not liking them. Because it's just a matter of taste, right?

Imagine though, a world where people like me were in the vast majority. Where Punt Road was clogged every weekend, because of the stream of fans crowding into theatres in town. Where theatrical chatter and gossip dominated talkback radio. Where the vocal chord polyps of musical stars were deemed front-page news, and opinion pages were filled with debate about the best way forward in ridding the early musicals of their racist and sexist overtones. Where men in pubs obsessed about whether Hamilton would ever come to Melbourne.

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Imagine being dragged by your Andrew Lloyd-Webber obsessed dad to see Phantom every Saturday.

In this world, school-aged children would be marched off to participate in "AusSing" each weekend, whether they liked it or not. Kids would be expected to have a favourite musical that they could relentlessly champion at school, lest they be left out at lunchtime, when show tunes are sung across the schoolyard. And we'd all get a public holiday to celebrate the opening of the latest big show imported from Broadway!

To many of you, this probably sounds like a nightmare. And fair enough. No one likes having something they hate shoved down their throats. But this is exactly how it feels for people like me every year when footy season comes around. Yes, I find AFL's business model, macho culture and reliance on gambling to be objectively problematic. But my main issue with the game is that I find it silly and mind-numbingly boring.

Now, I accept that this antipathy is just a matter of taste. The problem for me, and people like me, is that in Victoria it's entirely impossible to escape AFL. And hating it is considered weird. An attitude that has to be discussed, workshopped, and hopefully cured.

It's often said that football is like a religion in Melbourne, and this claim is more accurate than people generally realise. Because footy fans can be a lot like adherents to a fundamentalist religion. Dissenting from their orthodox view of the world marks you as a troublemaker, a heretic who needs to be brow-beaten back into compliance with the true faith.

A world where blokes in the pub discuss whether Hamilton will ever come to Australia.

In the end, football is just a game. And the inconveniences I suffer as a result of its popularity are just that: inconveniences. Yet there are real consequences for our children when one game dominates the sporting landscape so completely.

Hating musical theatre almost never leads to a hatred of all music, because show tunes are just one tiny part of the musical menu that people experience. But maybe things would be different in my fantasy world. I expect there'd be many children who'd grow up feeling damaged by quasi-compulsory participation in musical theatre, dwelling on memories of aggressively lyrical drama teachers, forcing them to belt out a vocal solo in class, insisting that they just need to toughen up and sing. They'd be haunted by the boredom of being dragged along to watch Phantom of the Opera every Saturday by their Andrew Lloyd Webber obsessed father, and the pressure to pretend that they cared about whether or not the Phantom is redeemed by Christine's kindness. And these kids might well end up thinking they hate music in general, given that their formative experience of it was so bound up with one particular form.

Illustration: Robin Cowcher

Perhaps the same is true of AFL in Victoria. There are many ways that kids might become disengaged, and sometimes enraged, by organised sport, but having one particular code relentlessly shoved down their throats has got to be high on the list. And in a world where we're struggling to keep our screen-obsessed children physically active, that really is a negative.